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11 October 2016

A Life Without Books ...

I’m big on books. A life without
books would be no life at all. I read every day. I couldn’t imagine a day
passing by without me dipping into a book, no matter how briefly. It’s one of
the reasons why I’ve never owned a television, there are far too many books to
read (plus it’s easier to listen to the radio whilst doing the washing up than
it is to watch a TV screen). I wasn’t always this way inclined though. As a
child I preferred being read to rather
than reading for myself. It was only later on that I began to enter into that
solitary yet contented withdrawal which is reading for oneself. That propensity
to absorb by listening is perhaps what later lead me towards the study of
history and anthropology. And perhaps it’s also why I prefer the radio to the
telly – they do say, after all, that you always get better pictures on the
radio!

Not everyone is keen on reading. I
once lodged with a friend who was far more interested in outdoorsy-type
pursuits. I remember her incredulous exclamation as she returned one frosty Sunday
morning from a bracing off-road cycle ride up and down the Chiltern Hills, only
to find me several hours later sitting in exactly the same position on the
sofa, cosy indoors with the same book in front of me. “You haven’t moved!” she
exclaimed. But I’m sure I’d travelled just as far in that space of time as she
had, except in a different way – with each turn of her bicycle’s pedals matched
by the number of pages which had accumulated under my left thumb.

Needless to say, being such a devoted
reader, my flat is stuffed full of books. But alas the space for an ever
growing personal library is finite. The bookshelves I’ve set up here are
groaning under the ever-accumulating weight. Nearly all the flat surfaces in my
home are simply abhorrent vacuums which have swiftly been filled by piles of
pages – books, magazines, off-prints, TLSs, academic journals, notebooks, guidebooks,
dictionaries, etc. Given the limitations of space every-so-often necessity
prevails and I have to thin my library down. This always poses a deeply
difficult dilemma: Which books should
make way for new acquisitions?

I attempted this task only this
morning in fact, and was rather surprised at the outcome. I managed to clear a
small swathe of tomes from a shelf which meant a stout pile that had
recently accrued on the desk nearby (and which, very inconveniently, was
preventing me from actually using my desk) slotted neatly into the vacated
shelf space. My surprise wasn’t so much at the apparent neatness of this act of
rotation, it was rather at the act of negation – Why was it, I wondered, that only
now could I envisage living withoutthese particular books which had once
been deemed so important and integral enough to my life that they should have taken
up permanent residence on my bookshelf? What had changed? Was that prior
importance simply relative? Had I lost interest in the topics they were centred
upon? Had I realised that other books in my collection covered the same
subjects such that these ones were
now redundant? … In this particular instance, I realised my re-classification
was essentially based on what might best be described as ‘associative memory.’

As I scanned the rest of my shelves
this realisation began to sink in more deeply. It struck me that most of the
books I own, and particularly those books I’ve owned the longest, are in some
way or another ‘associative tomes.’ In my mind, I don’t just simply recall them
as being particularly good reads,
although invariably this is almost always the case too; but moreover, I associate these specific books with
people, places, or particular times in my life. The book may have been given to
me by a dear friend or relation, or it might have been inherited from a certain
family member, or it might have been bought or read in a particular place
whilst travelling or at some other significant phase in my life. It dawned on
me that reading wasn’t simply confined to what the words within those pages
said – more often than not, when scanning the spines of those titles which I’ve
already read, I realised I could almost without fail recall where I’d bought or been given the book,
and also where and when I’d first
read it.

As such then, I began to perceive
that my library is caught in a constant ebb and flow of change. It regularly
builds and reduces itself. It is continually being re-categorised and refined.
Time and sensibility as much as utility and space are the main factors which
regulate what is retained and what is lost. In essence my personal library is
my life in the sense that it acts as a kind of mirror to my memory. The books
of greatest value are not simply those which are or might be most useful to me
either now or potentially in the future, but they are also those which are most
important to my past and my-previous-selves as well.

Alberto Manguel has written a
wonderful book which is a meditation on libraries – inspired by his own
library, which he has lovingly lodged in a 400 year old converted barn in
France – The Library at Night (Yale, 2005) is a paean to books, book-collecting, and the act of reading; examining
the use, nature and representation of libraries throughout the ages across the
world. Opening the front cover I see I’ve written my name at the top of the
title page in pencil with the note “Tokyo, 2011.” I didn’t really need this aide-mémoireas I still distinctly recall buying this book at the big Kinokinuya bookstore in Shinjuku’s Takashimaya Times Square (over the years I’ve spent a
small fortune there). I also distinctly recall devouring the book in the warm
evenings over the course of a week or so that particular summer. Since bringing
it home to my flat in the UK I’ve evidently not been the only one to keenly ingest
this particular book as the tell-tale gnawing of a silverfish can clearly be
seen on its spine (a literal ‘bugbear’ of my library as it’s currently stored
in my flat is that it seems to regularly draw in these ancient gnostic little
critters!).

Wherever I go I always seek out
libraries and bookshops. I’m particularly drawn to secondhand bookshops, as
these are the places where one is most likely to find rare and unusual treats
as readily as finding discounted treasures. This habit began whilst I was still
at Sixth Form College, when I regularly used to take myself “up to town” to
spend a day scouring the old bookshops along London’s Charing Cross Road as
well as the famous ‘Ripping Yarns’ bookshop in Highgate. Many of these shops,
as with the equally enthralling old bookshops in Greenwich, have sadly long
since disappeared. Yet thankfully, there are still a handful of good secondhand
bookshops still to be found in London; and, just as in my Sixth Form days, I
still visit these regularly in order both to bleed my wallet and better
insulate my flat for winter.

On a recent trip to Delhi I passed
along a book market lining the street whilst making my way to the famous Red
Fort, but it was in the small multi-level labyrinth of ‘Bahri Sons’ in
Khan Market that I found the kind of books I was looking for. Likewise, I’ve
found similar bookish enclaves in other cities too, such as the Bras Basah area
of Singapore and Tokyo’s Jimbocho. I’ve spent a lot of time and a lot of money
in Jimbocho over the years, particularly when I was living for a time in Tokyo
in 2009.

One of my favourites there is ‘Kitazawa Books,’ which is excellent for obscure academic titles as well as old Penguin
paperbacks up on the large upper floor. I bought a wonderful old hardback copy
of The African Queen by C. S.
Forester, which had previously belonged to the library of the USAAF in Yokohama
or something similar (sadly, despite the fact I lovingly restored the
dust-jacket myself, the book never made it home to the UK with me). I also
bought a gorgeous old paperback of Graham Greene’s The Quiet American there, which I read whilst travelling through
the Mekong Delta in Vietnam that summer (which happily did make it back to my
bookshelf here in London).

Another favourite there is ‘Oshima Books,’
which is particularly good for paperbacks as well as English literature and
literary criticism. A pristine copy of Everyman’s 1000th title – The Metaphysics by Aristotle bought from
here, as well as Basho and the Dao by
Peipei Qiu, plus a little book on Grammar
by Frank Palmer, and Conrad’s Romanticism
by David Thorburn (which I read twice, but also never made it home either)
stick in mind from there – as does my memory of the lady who runs the tiny
little shop from a desk perpetually buried in books at the back, always wearing a worn-in looking old apron and fingerless gloves.

I wouldn’t be so surprised if other
people felt the same – that books are bound up with time and place as much as
they are with the self who collects and reads them. Books are much more than
the tales or topics they tell. Books are a part of us, and just as I know I
will continue to read everyday until my eyesight goes or I go, I know I will
always continue to seek out libraries and bookshops – in the hope that one day
I too might find my own ‘Cemetery of Forgotten Books’ as in Carlos Ruiz Zafon’s
novel, The Shadow of the Wind, or
Umberto Eco’s forbidden library hidden within the monastery in The Name of the Rose. And, just as with Jorge Luis Borges’
labyrinthine Library of Babel, I
shall continue to reshuffle, as well as reject and replace tomes from my own
library as my memories of reading reconstitute themselves and settle down into
the rhythms of constant re-classification which my life prescribes – like
pebbles on a beach being shaped by the surge and pull of the tide. As time
permeates and accrues through all the thoughts and feelings which I’ve derived
from (or invested in) all those many pages which have so quietly accumulated in
my left hand, so too my library is both the mirror of me and the world I have
travelled. Indeed, this is why – for me at least – a life without books would be no life at all.